literature

Authors Write Books. Publishers Rename Them

Gianni Sarcone

Many people believe that a book’s title is born directly from the author’s brilliant mind. Cute idea… but often completely wrong.

In reality, titles are frequently chosen by publishers — and, above all, by their marketing teams, who sometimes treat a book title like a product label rather than a piece of literature.

Take one of the most famous titles of the 20th century: 1984 by George Orwell, the great English political writer. When Orwell wrote the novel in 1948, its working title was The Last Man in Europe. His publisher found it a little too gloomy and uninspiring, suggested reversing the last two digits of the current year, and voilà: 1984 was born.

Not a bad decision. That “commercial” title went on to become a cultural landmark, and many ideas and expressions from the book are still part of today’s political vocabulary.

1984

As an author, I’ve often had to fight battles to prevent publishers from giving my books painfully dull — or downright silly — titles. One of my books, for example, was given the wonderfully imaginative title Optical Illusions by the publisher. A title so original it could probably hide in a crowd of a thousand other books.

And yet… this “masterpiece of originality” went on to win the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize for the best science book for children.

Yes, yes. Sometimes even a boring title can carry a surprising little trick inside.

The Eternal Return

Gianni Sarcone

At times, I find myself resembling the shipwrecked man from The Invention of Morel, stranded on an island that at first appears deserted, almost welcoming in its deceptive silence. Yet something soon shifts. The people who inhabit it do not see him. He moves among them like a breath, a weightless trace, already slipping out of reality.

Gradually, he understands that his invisibility is not accidental. These bodies, these gestures, this frozen summer light… all obey another logic. A repetition. A projection. Life here has become mechanical memory, the reconstruction of vanished moments, orchestrated by a machine born of obsession.

And in the face of this unsettling truth, a decisive turn emerges: remain outside, intact and separate, or step into the image, accept dissolution within the cycle at the cost of one’s own substance.

The story leaves behind an unnameable imprint—a nostalgia without object, as if something within us recognized a scene already lived elsewhere. It opens a fissure in what we call reality: its fragility, its occasional nature as stable illusion, and the strange condition of the individual who must vanish in order to fully belong to what he contemplates.

A film worth seeking out, or even better, the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares on which it is based—brief in form, but long-lasting in its quiet afterlife within memory.

l'invenzione di Morel
Immortality, Love & Loneliness
the island
The island as described by Adolfo Bioy Casares

The First Hero’s Quest for Immortality

Gianni Sarcone

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known long-form poem in history—predating the Bible, The Iliad, and even the Mahābhārata. Often hailed as the first great work of world literature, this ancient Babylonian epic tells the story of a mighty hero, king of Uruk, who embarks on a quest for immortality. Its timeless themes—love, friendship, grief, the fear of death—still speak to us with surprising clarity.

Originally transmitted orally, the poem was later inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets. The version we know today was written in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the Babylonian Empire, over four thousand years ago. For centuries, the text was lost to history—until its rediscovery in fragmented form during the nineteenth century sparked renewed interest.

The tale begins with Gilgamesh, a powerful yet restless king, and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to challenge him. After a dramatic contest of strength, the two become inseparable companions. They journey to the sacred Cedar Forest, where they slay its divine guardian, Humbaba. When Gilgamesh rejects the goddess Ishtar, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven. The two heroes kill the beast—an act that angers the gods, who punish them by taking Enkidu’s life.

Stricken by grief, Gilgamesh sets out on a perilous journey in search of eternal life. He ultimately meets Utnapishtim, a flood survivor granted immortality by the gods. From him, Gilgamesh learns a harsh truth: death is man’s destiny; immortality belongs only to the divine.

More than a heroic saga, The Epic of Gilgamesh established the prototype for later epic heroes—from Heracles to Odysseus—and continues to inspire writers and artists today. Its enduring influence stretches across millennia and cultures.

In Forests, Robert Pogue Harrison draws on The Epic of Gilgamesh to explore the symbolic power of forests in the Western imagination. Gilgamesh’s felling of the sacred cedars and slaying of Humbaba reflects humanity’s first mythic confrontation with nature—marking the forest not as sanctuary, but as territory to be mastered. For Harrison, this moment signals the dawn of civilization’s long, uneasy relationship with the wild.

To truly grasp the spirit of the ancient world, I encourage you to read The Aeneid by Virgil, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the timeless Mahābhārata and The Epic of Gilgamesh. These foundational texts continue to illuminate the hopes, fears, and questions that have shaped human thought across the ages.

Gilgamesh